


Step in front of a runaway train

by Vaultdweller



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Eve is wild, F/F, Forensic psychologist/ serial killer AU, Medium Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:00:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22058932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaultdweller/pseuds/Vaultdweller
Summary: Eve is a forensic psychologist-turned advocate. Villanelle is a serial killer on death row. It's just supposed to be a job - another inmate in another shitty Florida prison. Until it's not. Until Eve starts to feel things she definitely shouldn't.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 129
Kudos: 459





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again!  
> This kid was bouncing around in my head, so I thought I would put it out as kind of a tester. I have a few chapters written and a vague plot idea, but want to see if there's interest before really committing. You can expect slower updates than 'Down, down under the earth,' which is my priority until it's finished. This is like, the cool side project. Maybe.  
> Unlike my other story, this will be entirely from Eve's perspective.  
> And I lived in Florida for four years. It knows what it did.

Florida sucks. 

It’s a shithole. There, Eve said it — it’s a shithole. 

Everyone thinks Florida is full of beautiful beaches and theme parks but really that’s just like, one-half of one percent of the deceptively large state. The rest is a truly heinous combination of swamp and absolutely fucking nothing, interspersed with the occasional trailer park and enough alligators to make you take a second look at every drainage ditch. Not to mention humidity so thick it's like wearing an extra layer of clothes, feels like you need gills to breathe. Like the mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs which, of course, are state employees. It’s a state that employs official mermaids and truly, that’s all you need to know about it. 

Her coworkers in the Atlanta office can eat a dick. Bill especially. It was his turn when this case came down the pipeline but oh no, he couldn’t possibly go to Florida for three months, he has a baby at home. As if the baby wouldn’t still be a baby when he got back. He probably isn’t even helping with the baby. No, he probably planned this baby so he could get out of going to Florida. That would be a dick thing to do. Right in Bill’s wheelhouse. 

Eve passes another dead armadillo on the side of the highway. She’s yet to see an actual living one, but she’s seen at least 15 dead ones on this remote two-lane stretch alone. Not to mention an unsettling number of turkey vultures circling overhead. They’re practically following her, like they know something she doesn’t. 

Don’t her coworkers know what this humidity does to thick, curly hair? Eve feels like she’s wearing some kind of woolly animal on her head, like a sheep. She’s never seriously considered shaving her head before now but she’s starting to see the appeal. She’s also going to burn her own personal hole in the ozone layer trying to run the rental car’s A/C high enough to stop her from sweating through her shirt. Her pit stains must be truly glorious at this point. 

_Oh look, another prison,_ she thinks absently to herself as she hurtles past another barbed-wire clad complex going well above the posted 70 mph speed limit. Florida may be known for its theme parks but its abundance of prisons is truly something to behold. For the last four hours all she’s seen is mile after mile of pine-logging forests with thousands of trees planted into unsettlingly perfect rows, broken up only by a new prison campus - complete with posted signs warning her not to pick up hitchhikers in the area, or warning her not to stop her car at all. 

_Not a problem,_ Eve thinks as she swerves around a gaggle of vultures picking at yet another smashed armadillo. They don’t even scatter at the sight of her car, just let Eve pass so close she can look at their shriveled heads, at their dead little eyes. Their heads turn and follow her. They regard each other through the driver’s side window. Some kind of understanding passes between them. 

Eve almost doesn’t see the huge mass in the middle of the road until it’s too late, doesn’t even have time to fully comprehend what it is, just slams the brakes out of pure instinct. The tires scream as they try and find purchase, find some kind of friction against the smooth asphalt. There are a million lights on the dashboard flashing as the car’s backup systems wrestle control away from her, deem her unworthy of piloting and take over. _What have you done?_

The car comes to an ungraceful stop, jolting Eve against the strap of seatbelt now cutting angrily into her shoulder. She opens her eyes - apparently she’d shut them at some point while skidding on the highway so that wasn’t great - to find her nose pressed against the steering wheel, her palms flat against the soft leather. Her gaze trains slowly upward, over the dashboard and steaming hood of the car to find … 

_A fucking pig?_

Boar would actually be more accurate - Eve doesn’t remember the cuddly pink pigs at petting zoos having giant fucking _tusks_. The swine, bristly and brindled, considers her and Eve’s rented Hyundai Elantra suddenly feels tiny and fragile, like being encased in a Faberge egg. If it so desired, it could probably climb right up onto the hood, charge her through the windshield. Eve swears the vultures have moved closer. 

She is going to _kill_ Bill. 

“Get out of here!” Eve shouts from the driver’s seat, gesturing with her hands, the universal sign for ‘fuck off.’ The boar doesn’t understand, didn’t learn this crucial piece of communicating with humans or, far more likely, it doesn’t care. Its ears prick toward the sound of her voice but the boar doesn’t budge. 

Eve’s fingers are undoing her seatbelt, flying to the door handle faster than her brain can have a second thought about confronting this beast that easily outweighs her by a good 300 lbs and wouldn’t be out of place stuffed and mounted in some hunting lodge somewhere, a world-class trophy. The pavement is hot, the exterior of the car is hot as she slams the door behind her, everything is hot because she’s in fucking _Florida_ staring down a wild _fucking_ pig. All she needs is an alligator to come up and bite her in the ass and she’ll have achieved some holy fucking trio. The _real_ Florida, just like the brochures said. 

“Listen to me you swine,” Eve snarls, advancing on the pig one step at a time, pointing her finger at it, accusing. Her best approximation of menacing. She has a passing thought that this is fucking _stupid_ but she’s ready to go out in a blaze of glory truly worthy of Florida Man. Or woman, in this case. “I have driven _six_ and a half hours to get here, leaving Atlanta, leaving _civilization_ behind to travel back in time into the Stone Age. I stupidly got off I-75 because I was worried about traffic and now I’m in the middle of asshole _nowhere_ with no cell service. I had to get gas at a station with no credit card machine and they had to take my number down _by hand_ and my bank has already called to check if I really bought a 64 oz soda at the Busy Bee. I did and guess what? I have to pee. But there’s nowhere to stop because there’s _nothing_ here! N-o-t-h-i-n-g.” She’s close enough to the pig now she could probably touch it, could probably tame it and ride it into the wilderness, give up on her job, her mind numbingly boring life and become the wild woman of Osceola National Forest. 

“But no,” she continues. “I still have to drive another _hour_ so I can sit in some dingy basement in a prison and waste the next three months of my life on a serial killer on death row who, by the way, is also carrying 15 _consecutive_ life sentences, not to mention a few hundred years on lesser charges! All consecutive! That’s like, a thousand years in prison!” 

Eve’s panting now in the viscid heat but the anger, the bubbling, boiling frustration has taken control now, is steering this ship and she is really leaning into it, letting it course through her. It’s the most alive she’s felt in _months._ Years, even. And she’s going to ride it, just like this boar. 

“And I’m supposed to _help_ her. Help her how, you ask? Fucked if I know!” She throws her hands up. The boar flinches. “So you, Mr. Pig, can either kill me or get out of the way. But we,” she gestures between the two of them. “Are not having a staring contest. What’s it gonna be?” 

Sensing that it’s come to some sort of juncture, the boar begins to back away slowly, one deceptively delicate looking hoof at a time, having decided that Eve was too unhinged for a meal. The vultures, having watched the exchange with interest, turn back to squabbling over the armadillo corpse. Eve feels time start to flow again, a great rushing river carrying her forward, to Union Correctional Institution. To death row. 

She climbs back into the driver’s seat and sits for a moment, closing her eyes. She can feel the sun beating against her forehead, the windshield acting like a magnifying glass, the beam burning a specific, concentrated hole into her cranium. At this rate she’ll have skin cancer at the end of her three month tour. 

She fucking _hates_ Florida. 

***

The basement is sickeningly cold, yet still somehow so moist. Eve feels the unnatural temperature change as she descends the creaking stairs with the warden. It feels, she thinks, like a tuberculosis outbreak waiting to happen. 

The warden is every bit the Southern stereotype, exactly who she would expect to see guarding inmates in some old prison movie, dragging his billy club along the bars, whistling some backwoods tune. He’s a stern country boy, his accent thick but genteel when he’s speaking to a lady. Tucked into a holster on his right hip is a shining steel revolver, a six-shooter. Eve guesses it was probably his daddy’s. 

“Are you sure you don’t want a guard in the room with you?” he drawls as Eve rolls her eyes. They’ve been over this six times already. Yes, she wants to speak face-to-face with the inmate. No, she doesn’t want bulletproof glass between them. Yes, she’s aware said inmate has killed at least 16 people, several in close quarters, in her cell. No, she doesn’t want a guard in the room. 

“I’m sure,” she answers, again. “These interviews require that both myself and the subject, the inmate, are able to speak freely. I can’t guarantee that with someone else in the room, listening.” 

“You realize she’s a psychopath.” 

“Actually,” Eve interjects, stopping suddenly to face the warden. She’s had enough. “The term ‘psychopath’ is considered horribly outdated in my line of work. Hardly anyone uses it and if they do, it’s because they’re trying to make someone out to be a villain, using pseudoscience and scare tactics to create a boogeyman so we don’t have to look too closely at our own shortcomings as a society in treating people with complex mental illnesses. The criteria to be considered a ‘psychopath’ are so broad and so subjective they could be twisted to include just about anyone, including you and me.” She takes a breath. “What’s more likely is this inmate is suffering from a cluster of personality disorders, coupled with childhood trauma and a system that let her slip through the cracks. She only gets labelled a ‘psychopath’ because it conveniently lets us shrug off the responsibility, the part we all played, in creating her.” 

The warden looks at her like he has some comeback about 'snowflakes' ready, but Eve is already pushing past him and into the sparsely furnished space that will serve as their interview room. She can just catch him mumbling about how political correctness has gone too far, how if you can’t call a psychopath a psychopath than the terrorists have won. She manages to bite down a smug grin, but only barely.

Eve stands rooted in the center of the room as the warden paces the perimeter, insisting on giving her a tour, as if she doesn’t have eyes and can’t see everything. Table, check. Chairs, check. Door, check. Creepy flickering overhead light, check. 

Having apparently gotten the hint, the warden doesn’t ask a seventh time if she’s sure she doesn’t want a guard. Or Eve has managed to piss him off enough that he’ll willingly offer her up to a convicted multiple murderer on a platter. Even better, she thinks. 

Either way, Eve can handle herself. 

“Are you ready?” he asks, clearly wanting to get this all over with, get this pencil-pushing brain out of his prison. Eve nods. He unclips the bulky radio at his hip. 

“Bring her down.”


	2. Could be worse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eve channels her inner (outer?) Dr. Spencer Reid

The wait is interminable. 

Eve feels as if she’s about to jump out of her skin, like she’s been soaking in a hot bath and if she rubs against the corner of the tub just right it will all come off, just peel away. She’s spent weeks studying this subject, reading police reports, interviews, thumbing through background material - but it’s not the same, it’s never the same as actually meeting them. Sitting across from them. Looking into their eyes. Gauging how much danger she’s in, within striking distance of a convicted, malicious murderer. The first meeting is always cuffs-on as a rule, but after, it’s up to her own discretion. The good ones know how to fool you, Eve knows, her fingertips rising to her throat, chasing a phantom pain, a phantom hand. 

There’s a crackle over the radio. The warden gives Eve one last withering look before heading to the open door. She can hear the deputy and her subject descending the rickety stairs, the heavy clop of combat boots and the lighter shuffling of prison sandals, each on an opposite rhythm. There’s mumbling at the door, Eve tries to make out what they’re saying but can’t. She’s holding her breath, she realizes several seconds too late, and has to take several gulps of air as the others re-enter the room. 

Oksana Astankova glides into the room, or as much as anyone can wearing prison-issue Crocs and leg shackles. Her hands are cuffed in front and Eve is struck at once by how she seems to take up no space, yet somehow commands all of it. The air shifts in the room as she enters, the molecules and atoms reorienting, suddenly, to orbit her. Eve holds out her hand, gesturing for the other woman to take a seat. She does, fitting her body precisely into the chair with no wasted movement. Eve drops into the seat opposite her, feeling oversized and clumsy. 

She allows herself a moment to study Oksana Astankova before starting the interview, a moment to orient herself with the woman in front of her. Oksana regards her, face carefully blank. Not empty but, shrouded, in a way, like someone peeking out at the audience from behind a curtain, hoping to not be seen. Her eyes - wide and catlike - are bottomless. Unfathomable. Like a long exposure lens, just open and taking in and in and in. She’s still in a way that takes discipline. but there’s something there, humming. Pure potential, suspended like a bow hovering over a violin string. 

It’s been way longer than a moment. Eve coughs, fumbling with Oksana’s file, so thick it could pass for  _ War & Peace _ . 

“Thank you for your time,” Eve starts, finding her voice after plunging in the other woman’s eyes like she’s on Splash Mountain. Fucking  _ Disney _ . “And for agreeing to meet with me.” 

It’s a lame opening, Eve knows. Oksana is on death row. She has nothing  _ but _ time right now (until she doesn’t) and she’s holed up in her cell 23 hours a day. It’s not like she’s running a Fortune 500 company. Of course she’s going to meet with Eve - it’s one less hour in her cell. But if she finds it ridiculous she doesn’t let it show, watching Eve, stock still, like a panther in the underbrush. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t even blink. A stationary object awaiting an action to fuel a reaction. It would be unnerving if Eve didn’t find it so fascinating. She thumbs open the file in front of her. 

“Um, I’m just going to get started, then,” Eve says, cautiously. “I have some questions I’d like to ask you, Oksana -” 

The room goes cold. Eve can feel it, instantly, how the air shifts. Goosebumps rise along her arm, the hair there standing on end, like a static charge. Oksana’s face is hard, like fired ceramic, but there’s a twitch, there, just above her lip, the movement slight but magnified among the surrounding stillness. A tic. A crack Eve wants to dig into with a knife, pull apart. Oksana mumbles something Eve can’t quite hear. 

“What was that?” Eve asks, leaning forward slightly, her hair sliding over her shoulder. 

“I said,” Oksana repeats, this time loud. Steady. “My name is  _ Villanelle _ !”

She pounds her cuffed hands on the steel top table, metal clanging against metal in an echoing punctuation. A statement. She’s leaned forward to match Eve and they’re just a finger’s width apart. Eve imagines she can see Villanelle’s breath condensing in the cold of the room, one angry huff after another. She’s close enough to see Villanelle’s eyes, hazel and burning, fiery brown blooming in a deep forest green. Eve’s heart stutters - not from fear, but from the feeling of being so close to something so utterly alive, so electric she’s practically sparking. It hits her chest with a jolt, the shock of being brought back to life. 

“I like that,” Eve replies. She can see the warden in the glass of the door, pacing like a corralled horse. “Isn’t that a kind of poem?”

Villanelle smiles, gleeful but cruel. She slides back into her seat, her legs spread wide, open, like how a man would sit on the subway. When she speaks this time her voice is different, a new edge to the knife. Her cheeks are high and angular, and each time the shadows move across them her face changes. Eve wonders how many times she’ll watch the woman in front of her shift into an entirely new person. 

“It is,” Villanelle drawls, her tone close to mocking. Tired, like she’s said this all before. “It is a long poem with a lot of rules and repetition, used mostly to speak of outsiders and ” - she licks her lips, raising an eyebrow at Eve - “obsession.” 

“That’s true,” Eve considers, absently fiddling with the corner of Villanelle’s file. “Though actually, the villanelle form was conceived, and most commonly used, to convey rustic and pastoral scenes, with the repetition easily translating into song. It’s only in its more modern interpretation that the villanelle is used to articulate obsession. The structure, the repetition, is meant to be serene,” Eve swallows. “Calming.” 

Villanelle watches her a long moment, her head tilting to the side, examining Eve from another angle.

“Who  _ are _ you?” she asks, her accent curling over the vowels. “How do you just …  _ know _ that?” 

She’s curious, Eve thinks. That’s good.

“I’m Dr. Eve Polastri,” Eve answers, unruffled. A complete and opposite reaction to the woman in front of her, thrumming full of nervous, capricious energy. 

“Ooh,” Villanelle purrs, wiggling her eyebrows in a way that suggests something rude. “A doctor. In that case, there’s something I need you to look at, under my shirt …” Villanelle lifts her elbows, starts to tug at her prison jumpsuit.

“Not  _ that _ kind of doctor,” Eve chokes out, reaching across the table. She catches herself halfway, her hand hanging suspended. She lets it drop onto the table between them. A boundary and, yet, an invitation. 

“Ah, okay, you are a …” Villanelle pauses, her eyes losing focus, like she lost something, some English word that she’s trying to find again. “A shrink. Yes, you are a shrink. Come to peer into my head and study me.” 

“No,” Eve laughs, realizing that, as bad as this is, it could be worse. “No I’m definitely not here to undertake the surely fruitless task of trying to diagnose you. Nevermind the undoubtedly Sisyphean chore of attempting to actually treat you. No,” Eve waves her hands in front of her, as if warding away even the thought of it. “No, absolutely not.” 

“Good,” Villanelle replies. She sounds, unsure? Eve realizes some of those words probably don’t translate well into Russian. “Because I like myself. A lot.” 

“Good,” Eve responds in kind. 

“But if you are not a physical doctor, and you are not a shrink,” Villanelle starts, counting off on her fingers, marking each option. “Then my question remains. Who are you?” 

“I’m an advocate,” Eve says simply. 

“An ad-” Villanelle’s accent catches on the syllables, a lagging transmission slipping into a new gear. “Ad-vo-cate? And for whom, are you advocating?” 

She’s landed on pronunciation somewhere between Russian and English, the syllabic emphasis slightly off, remade into something uniquely Villanelle. It strikes at something in Eve, like a stone against flint. 

“For you,” Eve answers. Villanelle gives a mock gasp, bringing her cuffed hands up to her chest, pointing to herself. 

“For me?”

“For you,” Eve affirms, near giggling now at the absurdity of it. 

She likes Villanelle, she realizes then, her lips resting into a genuine smile at the woman before her. Sure, she’s killed loads of people, Eve concedes, but sitting in front of her, it’s easy to strip all that away and focus on just Villanelle. Whoever she is. Rude, Eve settles on. And probably insufferable. Too smart for her own good. Too wild and clever, like a cat who knows she’s misbehaving but can’t help herself, can’t fight the instinct to get into trouble. The thrill of it. 

“Eve,” Villanelle croons, cutting through all semblance of formality, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the table, her cuffed hands bracketing Eve’s. “Eve, I have been sentenced to death.”

“Yes,” Eve responds. 

“And even if - if! That were reduced, it would still be life without parole,” she continues, leaning closer. Eve can feel the air around her prickling. 

“Yes.” 

“And I would still have at least a dozen more life sentences to fight against.” 

“Yes.” 

“Plus adding together all the time for lesser offenses …” 

“Yup.” 

Villanelle drops back into the chair, then, crossing her arms as best she can with her wrists cuffed together. Eve almost follows her, pulled into a gravity well, the vacuum in the space she’s left behind. 

“Wow, Eve,” she says. “You must have  _ really  _ pissed someone off.” 

Eve huffs out a laugh, shaking her head while drawing out a report from Villanelle’s file, pretending to carefully inspect it. 

“You have no idea.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I'm going to spend this whole story trying to squeeze in an Arrested Development "They don't allow you to have bees in here" joke


	3. The runaway train

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'ma be real with you chiefs, I don't really know where this one's going, but it's fun to write

Once upon a time, before there was Raiford, or Florida, or even Atlanta, there was Kentucky. 

Kentucky was a place almost exactly like Florida except for one, crucial difference - seasons. A place should have seasons. A natural order to things. An outward change to mark the passing of time. In Florida, everything was endless and miserable and hot. Sometimes it was less hot. Sometimes more hot. Always though, an air conditioning unit was taking up at least one of your windows. Ugly and impossible to hide. 

Kentucky, though. That was different. Eve remembers being sent down there from Quantico as a rising agent to consult on a case with the Edmonson County Sheriff’s Office. A series of hitchhikers taken off KY-70, their bodies dumped in Mammoth Cave National Park. Deliver a profile like a good little FBI agent and leave - that was her directive. The locals weren’t exactly happy about her presence, per usual. But Eve? Eve lingered in the mountains. Amazing, what a bit of frost on your windshield in the morning can do for your soul. 

And that’s how Eve, spindles of ice still lingering on her car, found herself pulling off a winding road in the national park onto a dirt path linking up to a remote trail. The slam of her car door echoed off the rock faces and everything was still, save the trees popping as the frozen sap thawed in the early morning sun. On the trail, a few yards in, Eve came across a park sign. A warning. Framed in drawings of a rattlesnake, a buck, a bear and a bobcat were the words: “Be prepared to meet nature on its own terms.” 

As far as hiking advice, it was pretty fucking ominous. Ominous enough she turned around, got in the car and drove directly back to Quantico without so much as stopping to pee. So ominous she never went hiking again. 

It had, however, been the best life advice she’d ever heard. 

A dozen-or-so years later, in Raiford, middle-of-shitfuck-Florida, Eve sits across from Villanelle. She notes the wild, bubbling energy humming under her skin. Her wide, searching eyes. Tuned to Eve’s every move, every shift. Not a rattlesnake, bear, or buck. But a bobcat. Eve read once, that a bobcat will purr before it tears out your throat. Meaner than the devil. Eve likes that. 

The report sits poised at her fingertips. A handful of opportunities. Points of entry. But here, in Raiford, middle-of-shitfuck-Florida — here Eve is prepared to meet nature on its own terms. 

She pulls out four glossy crime scene photos and sets them out in a grid on the table. They’re gruesome, but artful. If you know what you’re looking at. Eve’s seen thousands of crime scene photos. Mangled bodies. Gnarled decapitations. Violent strangulations. She’s never seen any quite like these, though. It reminds her of Renaissance paintings - not the ones of nude women and grapes, but of gutted men set against moonlight.

“Where does someone learn to kill like this?” Eve asks. Villanelle’s eyes are trained on the photos. Her pupils glimmer in the dim light. 

“Luck,” she says, offhand. 

“I don’t think so,” Eve counters. Reaching out, she picks up a photo, examining it. A man hanging from a barn beam by his foot, left ankle tucked behind his right knee, arms tied behind his back, throat slit.  _ The Hanged Man,  _ Eve thinks.  _ Life in suspension.  _ Standing slightly, she slides it across the table, closer to Villanelle, whose hands automatically rise, reaching out to touch it, only to be caught, just short, by her shackles. 

“I represented a doctor, once, who kidnapped, sedated and butchered his patients using what he learned in medical school,” Eve continues. “You could see the skill in his work. He knew exactly what tendons to snip, what tools to use. Each piece was so clean it could have hung on a hook in a shop. 

I also interviewed a 23-year-old who snapped one day and bludgeoned a woman to death with a golf club for having the audacity to turn him down.” 

Villanelle’s eyes lock to Eve’s. A current passes between them. A thrill. That Eve would speak so openly of murder and violence. Things meant for whispers now said out loud. She can speak Villanelle’s language. With an accent, yes, but the meaning is there. The recognition. 

“Your work looks more like the doctor’s. Don’t sell yourself short.” 

“Are you trying to flatter me into answering your questions?” There it is, Eve thinks. The purr. She smells dinner somewhere. A heartbeat in the grass. 

“Maybe,” Eve replies, evenly. “Is it working?”

"Maybe,” Villanelle mimics. Slides forward in her seat. Raises her heels. Eve notes the tension in her legs, wound up in her quads and calves. Ready to pounce. Eve quickly tries to do the math on the PSI limits of that now suspiciously dinky-looking chain between Villanelle’s cuffs, testing it against the power she sees coiled in Villanelle’s thighs. In her biceps. 

“How did you do that?” Villanelle asks. She’s leaning forward on her elbows. Eve can’t stop looking at the chain tying Villanelle to herself. It reminds her of a constellation, each connecting point a star. 

“Do what?”

“You knew I was lying, but instead of calling me a liar, you … you turned it,” Villanelle says with a gesture, like she’s turning a door. But also turning the words in her head, trying to find the right ones in English. Eve wishes she’d studied Russian. Villanelle’s probably a real whip in Russian. 

“You turned me around so I wanted to tell you the truth,” she continues. “How did you do that?” 

“Luck,” Eve says, offhand. Two can play at that game. 

Villanelle looks at her for a long moment. Eyes, face suspended. Like she’s cycling through a lifetime of learned reactions, unsure of which to give to Eve. A Rubix cube turning and turning and turning until it lands on a solution. Lips curl into a lazy grin. It’s soft but sharp, Villanelle’s canines on full display. A reminder of who she is under the prison jumpsuit. Who she could be, without the chains holding her back. 

“You are funny, Eve,” she says. Her tone’s shifted again. This, Eve thinks, may be genuine. “You are … unlike anyone I’ve spoken to. In here at least.” 

“I believe that,” Eve says. “Now, are you going to tell me?” 

Eyebrows perk up. Villanelle licks her lips, long and slow, before looking down at the array of photos. Like it’s the menu at Denny’s. Like she only has to point to what she wants. No words required. 

It’s warm in the room, in this basement, suddenly. Like the simmering heat stalking the upper floors has found them. Has found Eve, at least. Looking at Villanelle’s lips, the air is so thick she needs gills to breathe. She curses her ancestors, whatever simple organisms first crawled out of the oceans way back in her evolutionary chain. She’s going to drown here. There’s a buzzing in her head, a high, sharp note she feels in her teeth. Like a lone cicada shrilling to the sun. 

Wait, no. The sound isn’t in her head, Eve realizes belatedly. It’s outside of her head. It’s the lightbulb above them. It’s going to … 

With a staticy  _ pop,  _ the bulb fizzles out, plunging them into darkness. 

“Piece of shit,” Eve mutters. 

She should call for the deputy. She should stand up, now, and fumble her way to the door. She’s not the one done up in chains. She’s free to move as she pleases. 

Eve doesn’t move. She sits, rooted to the chair, her feet still, like they’re sunk in cement, staring. Staring into the darkness, total and stygian, where she knows Villanelle sits. Staring back. Eve can feel her stare like a weight on her chest. There’s no light but she swears she can see Villanelle’s eyes, illuminated not from the outside, but from something within. Eve licks her lips, now. Sucks in a thick breath. The buzzing is back. The cicada. Calling and calling and calling in her head. Or maybe a warning. Rain coming. Something ghosts across her lips. A breath? Did Villanelle silently stretch herself across the table? Is she perched there, now? Are her claws out? Would she purr? 

Eve wants to lean forward. Wants to get closer to whatever burns inside Villanelle. A red giant before it collapses into a black hole. She wants to feel what makes Villanelle so alive in a place designed to break you. 

Then, there’s a bright light in her face - the beam of a flashlight cutting through the room. Eve turns away, blinking, until her eyes adjust. Villanelle still sits in the chair across from her. She hasn’t moved, is only staring at Eve. Just staring. Like she’s … 

“Sorry ‘bout that, ladies,” the deputy mumbles, examining the burned out lightbulb over them. “Budget cuts. You know how it is.” 

Eve hums an acknowledgement, focused on quickly gathering up the photos and tucking them back into Villanelle’s file. Villanelle doesn’t move. Only watches. Eve needs to get out of here. 

“That’s alright,” Eve says, standing. “We were just about done here anyways. I can see myself out.” 

She leaves through the open door without another word, footsteps echoing as she ascends the stairs. Villanelle’s eyes, her stare, boring holes into Eve’s back. 

*******************

The sun is just beginning to dip behind the rows of gangly scrub pine when Eve exits the prison but heat still rolls off the pavement in waves. The parking lot is empty and desolate this time of day, with only a few sabal palms dug in between her and her car, providing not even the most rudimentary amount of shade. Useless, Eve thinks. Palm trees are useless for shade, yet Florida is stuffed with them. None of them native. That has to say something. Eve’s too hot to think about what that something is, her clothes already clinging to her uncomfortably as she crosses the lot, palm berries fermenting in the heat and filling the air with a heady, sour scent. 

There’s something on her car. She’s about ten paces out when she realizes it, digging the key fob out of her bag to unlock the door. Something black on her car, she can’t quite make it out in the light.  _ Jesus,  _ Eve thinks.  _ If it’s a fucking pig I swear to Christ …  _

It’s not a pig, because that would be ridiculous. She doesn’t want to even think about explaining that to insurance. The mass stretches and shakes out its wings and Eve realizes it’s a crow. A big ol’ crow, as they’d say around here. It eyes her studiously, tipping its head at different angles to get a good look at her. 

This has to be some sort of omen, right? Crows don’t just  _ do  _ this. She doesn’t even have any chips. Around them, the world grows quiet. Plunges from sunset to darkness faster than it should. No twilight, no dusk. No foreplay. Not even the crickets acknowledge them. 

The crow shakes its wings again. Eve feels the wingbeats somewhere in her chest like a pulse. 

“Caw,” the crow says. 

“Yeah,” Eve answers, nodding. “Yeah.” 

Satisfied with her answer, the crow nods back, sagely, before taking off into the night. Off to dispense more advice, Eve assumes. With a flash of the headlights and a peppy chirp the sedan unlocks and Eve crawls inside. She has a 45-whole-ass-minute drive to her hotel in Lake City. A 45-minute drive alone. To think. 

_ Fuck Carolyn.  _

Off to a good start in the thoughts department, Eve pulls out of the parking lot and into the night. Toward what she hopes is the right direction, because god knows she doesn’t have any cell service. 

Eve’s twin headlights cut through the night, the two lane road alternating between racetrack straightaways and totally blind curves. At each turn, she expects a huge 4x4 pickup truck to come screaming around the corner and drift into her lane, leaving her a splat in the pavement. She squints against the darkness, unable to make out any of the landscape around her. There hasn’t been a sign, even a mailbox for miles, each side of the road shrouded in an impenetrable dark curtain. No street lights. Nothing. Like she’s driving down a tunnel, or some winding road down to purgatory. This is how people end up in Florida. They end up on some liminal highway in the middle of the night and can’t find their way out. 

_ Fuck this, but fuck Carolyn specifically.  _

The mysterious, all-powerful, all-seeing head of their nonprofit advocacy agency rarely stuck her nose in the business of each individual field office, but when she did, it was never good. It wasn’t good a year ago when she heavily hinted Eve should go against her strong professional instincts and recommend life-without-parole for a client who already strangled two cellmates to death. It wasn’t good when, six months ago, Eve’s caseload - by Carolyn’s recommendation - dwindled down to petty offenders and bail jumpers. 

And it wasn’t good when, a week ago, Eve’s phone rang and Carolyn informed her she was picking up the Astankova case for Bill. Forcing Eve to give a fuck when it wasn’t her turn to give a fuck. Give a fuck about someone who, no matter what Eve does, is going to die. Whether it’s on a gurney in the execution chamber, or when a fellow inmate stabs her in her stupid, beautiful face. 

**Wait.**

Eve manages to get her foot on the brake just in time to avoid having the front of her car taken off by a … train? 

“What the fuck?” she whispers because rolling past her windshield is a fucking train. A train! In the middle of the night. No warning. Eve only just seeing the singular headlight coming up on her right. Didn’t even hear the blare of the horn. It’s not a fast train, not an Amtrak people carrier, but one of those slow, rambling locomotives, laden with lumber and steel pipes, probably. It’s so slow she can make out the graffiti on the side illuminated by her own headlights, and so close the beams reflect off the metal back at her, like there’s a spotlight on her. 

“Did I miss a crossing?” Eve rolls down her window to get a better look but no, there’s no wooden arms across the road or flashing lights. Just a train. A goddamn train. In the middle of nowhere. A phantom in the night.

“Looks like ol’ Betsy almost got you.” 

There’s a man at her window, suddenly, on a rusted out bike. He’s shirtless, obviously, light reflecting off the thick sheen of sweat across his back like a technicolor dreamcoat. It must keep the bugs off, Eve thinks. All that sweat. He spits a brown liquid onto the pavement between them. 

“Yeah,” Eve says, distracted as her brain tries to fit together everything happening here because, well, it’s a lot. “Would it have killed you guys to have a railroad crossing sign? Maybe some flashing lights? Anything?” 

The man shrugs. In front of them, the train - Betsy, apparently - continues to amble by at her own pace. Eve’s never getting out of here, she realizes. She’s going to be stuck in this spot forever. Smelling the pine logs and this man’s sweat.

“Everyone from around here knows when she comes,” he says, finally. 

“And what if you’re not from around here?” 

The man spits again, on the other side this time. For politeness.

“You learn.” 

At once, Betsy’s caboose rolls by and the way forward is clear. Teetering slightly, the man brings his feet back to the pedals and pushes off, though instead of rolling forward, over the tracks, he makes a hard U-turn, looping back the way he came. Drifting back into the night. Eve watches him in the rearview mirror for a moment before cautiously taking her foot off the brake and crossing the tracks. 

Only 25 minutes to Lake City. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, come yell at me on tumblr @vaultdweller or Twitter @vaultdwellerke1


	4. Nightcall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Working out some ... stuff

Eve sits in her hotel room inhaling a Zaxby’s Wings n’ Things meal, the contents of the Astankova case spread before her on one of the room's two twin beds in a large, gruesome fan. Licking hot honey mustard sauce off her fingers, she slides a crime scene photo toward her for a closer look, fingertips touching the glossy surface with a kind of reverence. 

A man, kneeling in front of a bed, his knees on the floor, face pressed into the mattress with his hands tied, not behind him, as if he was being subdued, but in front of him. Placed on his head, a white pillow with a hole right at the base of his skull. Eve can see the burn marks around the hole from the muzzle of the pistol. It’s an interesting touch. The mark of a practiced killer, knowing the pillow would muffle the sound of the gunshot. It adds an air of professionalism to the kill, but Eve suspects that, at least for Villanelle, there’s something else there too. 

The victim was in his early 50’s, solidly built, if not a tad portly, like most Southern men of a certain age. How did she control him? How did she tie his hands in front without him fighting back? He wasn’t posed after death, he was shot there, in that position. How did she get him to kneel next to the bed, like a little kid saying his nightly prayers? What power did she yield, that she could make a grown man revert back to a schoolboy?

The room’s AC kicks on with a shudder, the breeze rustling some of the papers. It startles Eve enough to bring her back into herself. She’s getting carried away, here. In more ways than one. The photos are just a small part of what she should be reviewing, relevant only in looking for signs of coercion, excessive cruelty or mental instability. She’d walked away from a decade-long career as an FBI profiler for a reason. 

And yet. 

And yet looking at Villanelle’s kills was reminding her what she was drawn to in the first place. 

With a sigh, she pushes the photo back toward the pile with the rest, fingertip sticking a bit, leaving behind a slightly yellow print along the edge. Enough of a print for a skilled technician to lift and compare. It would probably even hold up in court. If anyone turned up dead in her hotel room, Eve thinks, she’d be fucked. Conviction by hot honey mustard sauce. Amazing, how one little slip can land someone in prison for the rest of their life. Amazing, how many people she’d help put away on less. 

Ah yes, there it is. Romantic longing over. Cynicism is back. 

Rising from the bed, Eve pads over to the window. The hotel boasted a view of  _ the  _ Lake City lake, but what they don’t tell you is that the lake is more like a man-made retention pond. Still has gators, though. Eve watches one slink lazily through the shallow water, fat off tourist scraps and the occasional dog given too much leeway on its leash. Moonlight breaks over the water’s surface like a hundred shimmering fireflies and if Eve stands right in front of the air conditioner and blinks enough, it’s almost nice. 

_ I wonder what Villanelle is doing right now _ , she thinks, watching the gator’s tail propel it along in slow, symmetrical strokes.  _ I wonder what she’s thinking about.  _ Her impending appeal, maybe? Probably not, Eve decides. That would be too responsible of her. Home, then, perhaps? That tiny village in Russia? No, from her file Eve knows Villanelle has nothing left there. Her kills, then? Does Villanelle carry them with her, revisiting them from her cell the way a serial killer revisits the scene of the crime? 

A flush of goosebumps breaks out over Eve’s bare legs. An entirely inappropriate reaction to thinking about serial killers. Time for bed, then. 

Brushing her teeth vigorously, Eve stares at her reflection in the mirror, willing herself to not do whatever the fuck she’s doing. _Villanelle is in her cell, idiot_ , she tells herself, because she’s a convicted murderer. Convicted and unapologetic about it. _She’s in her cell and you’re in your hotel room and there should definitely be more glass between the two of you during interviews_. The bulletproof kind. 

Spitting a wad of pink foam into the sink, Eve runs her toothbrush under the water again and jams it back into her mouth, scrubbing out the remnants of her glorious Zaxby’s dinner, rough bristles working over her tongue. Scrubbing out all thoughts of Villanelle, because Villanelle is in Raiford, in her cell. She’s in her — 

“Hello, Eve.” 

The toothbrush skips over Eve’s tongue, hard plastic jabbing the back of her throat as she full-body gags into the sink, heaving into the basin with great greedy breaths. 

“What the fuck,” she manages to cough, eventually. In the mirror, cold, hazel eyes watch her reflection.

Eve spins, holding her toothbrush out and pointing at Villanelle like an unsharpened shiv. Villanelle’s eyes cross, briefly, as she gauges the weapon, her hands coming up hesitantly, palms facing Eve. Her pale skin glows in the vanity lights, contrasting sharply with the darkness at the edge of the room, but instead of being concealed by shadows, the shadows seem to emanate from her, licking off her body in dark flames fueled by something deep within her. Or, perhaps not so deep. 

“What a rude greeting,” Villanelle says, more to Eve’s toothbrush than to her. She still hasn’t met Eve’s eyes directly. “I was under the impression you wanted me here.” 

“What on  _ earth _ would have given you that impression?” 

“Didn’t you feel it?” Villanelle’s eyes find hers now, two muted spotlights. Eve’s headlights, reflected back at her by the side of the train. “In the dark. Could you feel me like I felt you?” 

In that particular moment, Eve would rather die than admit she felt anything. Which, considering she’s apparently trapped in a hotel bathroom with a convicted multiple murderer, is actually the most likely outcome. Letting out a long breath, she mentally weighs her options as fast as possible, following each choice like a thread. There’s always the good ol’ standby of screaming hysterically … 

“Don’t scream,” Villanelle says. Her hands are still up, but relaxed, fingers curled in against her palms. 

Screaming’s out then. Could she get by Villanelle and get to her cell phone fast enough to call 911? Or the desk phone? Is that even connected to an outside line? 

“I hid your mobile. And unplugged the room phone.” 

Splendid. Just her and Villanelle, then. And since Villanelle seems to be able to read minds, Eve empties hers, choosing to act purely on instinct. Which has served her wonderfully so far. Not.

Pushing forward, she jabs Villanelle straight in the chest with the hard plastic toothbrush. Right in her sternum. But rather than evaporate into an unreal vapor, like Eve half-expected, Villanelle winces as the toothbrush hits solid, very real, bone. 

“Oh shit,” Eve mutters in wonder. 

“Yes,” Villanelle echoes, nodding as her hand comes up to rub at her chest. “Oh shit.” 

Something in Eve snaps, then. A rat trap sprung, close enough she can feel the breeze of it on her face, missing her paw but only just. Eve’s legs spring, propelling her through Villanelle with a shove and out the bathroom door. Once through the threshold, she turns, not toward the door to get out of the room, but toward the window, like a canary in a coal mine, seeking the pale moonlight. She presses her face against the glass, searching, illogically, for the gator in the lake. Needing its presence to anchor her back into some form of reality. The lake, though, is empty. In the gator's place sits a crow, perched on the branching fronds of a palm tree. 

“Caw,” the crow says. Eve feels it, hears it in her head, rather than her ears. 

Behind her, Eve hears Villanelle amble into the room, a far cry from the sleek predator she expected. Closing her eyes, she counts to three, then three-and-a-half, then, finally, a long, drawn out four, before turning around with a sigh. 

Villanelle is staring, not at her, but at the bed, the crime scene photos spread out like a tarot card reading. She seems … entranced. Until she eyes the empty nips Eve pilfered from the mini bar tossed carelessly on the nightstand. 

“Were you having a party or something?” Villanelle asks, turning toward Eve and giving her shoulders a little shimmy. Against her better judgement, Eve can feel a grin worming its way out her mouth. 

“Just reviewing your case,” Eve replies, deciding, at least for the moment, to play along. 

“Eve,” Villanelle purrs, taking a step toward her. “I am flattered. Truly. But you need a healthier work-life balance.” 

“I have no idea what that means.” 

“It means,” she continues, slinking through the dark, canines glimmering in the shadows. “From 9 to 5 you are a good worker bee. But after 5 — poof! — the job disappears and you can have fun again.” 

“Yeah? And how many jobs have you had?” 

Villanelle pouts, her lower lip now a tempting target. Something strums in Eve, something low and deep. 

“I’ve had lots of jobs. Some big. Some small. I even sold awful t-shirts to tourists in Panama City Beach.” 

“That does sound awful.” 

“It  _ was _ ,” Villanelle whines. “They had no respect at all for my talent. There was no fun.” 

“Maybe,” Eve says, slowly. Carefully. “Maybe reading your file  _ is  _ fun.” 

The shoe drops. Villanelle looks at her like her world has just bottomed out, a vessel completely empty and open, waiting for Eve to fill her. 

“What else?” she whispers. Eve swallows. 

“You’re bright. Extremely bright. Powerful.” With each word, Villanelle inches closer. Eve feels her presence against her skin like a magnet, some otherworldly hum, though whether it’s attracting or repelling she hasn’t quite discerned. 

“And,” Eve continues. “And you are  _ so  _ incredibly talented at what you do.” 

Warm lips are on her, then. A hot, insistent mouth. Again, where Eve expected Villanelle to dissipate like a dream she’s there, surging forward, wiry, coiled muscles pressing Eve back against the window. She feels her heart beat in time, like slow, steady wingbeats against her ribcage. Rather than try to match Villanelle’s frantic pace, Eve stays calm, steadfast in the storm as Villanelle swirls around her. 

“More,” Villanelle huffs against her lips. Fingers thread, reverently, through Eve’s hair as she’s tugged off the window and spun back toward the bed. 

“You kill unlike anyone I’ve ever seen.”

She’s being walked backward, each step heavier than the last.  _ This is how she did it, _ Eve thinks. Not this, specifically, maybe, but  _ this.  _ Villanelle. Overpowering. The back of her knees hit the mattress. Behind her, she knows, are the photos of Villanelle’s kills but for once, Villanelle isn’t looking at them, is only looking at Eve. 

“They’re flashy, but meaningful,” she says, biting her lip. Looking right back at Villanelle. “They make you feel things.” 

“Feel things?” Villanelle whispers. Eve nods as, with a nudge, she’s pushed back against the mattress. 

.

.

.

Eve’s phone rings. 

With a groan, she opens her eyes, then instantly regrets it, her head lighting up in a dull, aching throb originating from somewhere at the base of her skull. Where all her instinctual functions live. Hungover, apparently, being one of them. Her spine is now fused in whatever fucked up position she’d slept in and crime scene photos, still littering the bed, are stuck to her leg thanks to the sheen of sweat that comes with every swampy Florida morning. Because that’s totally it. Not whatever fucked up dream she had. 

Right on cue, the air conditioner kicks on and Eve is instantly both overheated and chilled to the bone. Rubbing her thighs together, she digs under the comforter for her phone, not bothering to look at the caller ID before picking up. She knows who it is. 

“Carolyn.” 

“Hello, Eve. How are you this morning?” 

“It’s,” Eve looks at the clock. “Barely 5 a.m.” 

“Right, well. How are you getting on with Ms. Astankova?” 

“Fine,” Eve says, her voice a little too high as she tries to shoo away phantom lips lingering from a dream. “Swimmingly.” 

“I thought you might.” 

“I … don’t really want to consider the implications there,” Eve says, reaching for a piece of stale garlic bread left in a styrofoam container on the bed. 

“She terrified her last two public defenders and three mental health professionals so badly they quit nearly on the spot.” 

“Good for her,” Eve replies with a mouth full of bread. 

“See? I knew you were the right fit. But she can be tough. Perhaps you might consider a more, personal, approach to her case.”

“Are you encouraging me to get closer to a client?” Eve asks. 

“I’m not encouraging you to do anything. Except keep me informed of any … interesting developments.” 

“Will do.” Overcome with an urge to get off the phone as quickly as possible, Eve raps her knuckles, loudly, against the wood of the nightstand in an insistent knock. 

“Sorry, Carolyn. Room service is here. Gotta go, talk to you later.” 

Hanging up, Eve tosses her phone onto the other twin bed. It’s still dark, the first rays of Florida sun still a long way off. But, Eve thinks as a hungry growl rips through her stomach, room service doesn’t sound so bad. Reaching for the room phone, Eve brings the receiver to her ear, then stops. 

There’s no dial tone. 

Heart pounding, her fingers trace the cord at the back of the phone, down behind the nightstand. She finds the end dangling just above the floor. 

Unplugged. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come find me on Tumblr @vaultdweller or Twitter @vaultdwellerke1 and put me in jail


	5. To retreat underground

It’s so fucking bright. 

Brighter than it has any right to be, really. Brighter than should be allowed. The flat road, the flat earth extends outward infinitely in each direction like a piece of plywood, the scrub pine sticking up like splinters, tall but never tall enough to puncture the clear blue sky and bring rain. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Once they get too tall, it’s all harvested for timber, the land cleared and scorched, with new saplings, knee-high and fragile, planted in their place, the cycle beginning over again. You can mark time in the height of the saplings-turned-trees, each patch stretching uniformly, growing together, taller than the last. Taller and taller still, until nothing. 

It’s the closest thing Florida has to an origin myth, probably. One that doesn’t involve talking mice and magic castles. 

Eve had found it unnerving, all those years ago, during her brief stint in the FBI’s Jacksonville Field Office. How the trees all grew in perfect lines. How you could stand in one spot and look out, endlessly, left, right, north and south. How you could look in and all the way down, to the Gulf, in some cases. Back in time, maybe. To something you’re not meant to find. 

Driving from Lake City to Raiford, though, more than a decade after she kissed the mouth end, the civilized end, of the Panhandle goodbye, she knows what to expect. Knows what she’ll see if she turns her head to either side of this two-lane highway designed to hurl cars at each other like a Hot Wheels track. Row after row of perfectly straight trees, standing in perfect military formation. Silent witnesses to her journey. To her guilt. The space between just wide enough to show you what you’ve been hiding from. 

So no less unnerving then. Just in a different way. Which is progress. Maybe?

Dead armadillos lay along the side of the road like mile markers and with her darkest pair of sunglasses, the pair she’s pretty sure are made for people with actual extreme light sensitivity and blindness, Eve is still squinting against the light. But with the way a creeping tendril of pain squeezes around her head like a clamp, who’s to say she  _ isn’t  _ one of those sensitive people? 

Eve snorts, the car wobbling a bit as she takes a turn going 80mph. She is sensitive, of course. To bullshit. And this whole thing, this whole case, is saturated with it. 

_ A more personal approach.  _ What does that even mean? 

But Eve clamps that thought down too, adds it to the clamp around her head, because the stack of styrofoam boxes, the stack she’d had to go slightly out of her way for, and get out of the hotel extra early for, says she knows  _ exactly  _ what personal touch means. Not that there’s any touching happening, outside of last night’s fever dream. And we can’t be held responsible for our dreams. What is this,  _ 1984?  _

Eve curls her lip, disgusted by her own reference. Sounding like an entitled white man in Lit. 101 being told that yes, there is actually something wrong when your most-searched porn keyword is “teen.” 

Yes, you can be held responsible for your dreams. Because dreams never ever ever just  _ stay  _ dreams. Thinking of them, forming them in your mind puts the energy into the universe and they will rise and stalk you to the end of the earth. And that’s why she’s booked herself a nice long weekend in Panama City Beach. In Villanelle’s old stomping ground. Maybe, if she’s lucky, dream Villanelle will stalk her there. Show her around. 

___

There’s a man already at the visitor check-in counter when Eve slips into the UCI lobby, his hulking form taking up so much space Eve has to step back out of fear she’ll be caught in his gravitational pull. He’s wearing a bulky wool peacoat and Eve thinks he’s either naked under there or he must be dying, soaked through with sweat, the porous texture of the wool sucking it all up like a sponge to be wrung out later. His balding head, crowned with white hair, shakes vigorously as he listens to the woman behind the barred window. 

“I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Vasiliev,” the woman, Barbara, says to him in that buttered-up, Southern way that always sounds polite when really they’re telling you to eat a sandspur. “She has an appointment this morning and cannot see you.” 

“But I sent her a message saying I was coming,” says Mr. Vasiliev, apparently, his accent thick and Russian. “Did she get it?” 

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” Barbara returns before glancing beyond the annoyance in front of her and toward Eve. “Ah, Dr. Polastri. You can head on down. Inmate Astankova is already waiting.” 

“Wait,” the man says, turning to face Eve, effectively blocking any feasible way forward. “You are going to see Villanelle?” 

Eve pauses, sits with the knowledge that this man knows Villanelle, knows her well enough to use her preferred name. Mentally, she thumbs through Villanelle’s file - no family or blood relatives, hardly any close relationships. She didn’t even have an emergency contact on file. Who was this man who, frankly, looked like a black bear up on its hind legs? 

“I work with Villanelle, yes.” 

“You are a doctor, though,” he says, voice laced with amusement. “Are you a shrink? I will give you a hint, if you are. Run. Run now.” 

Eve frowns and at that, the man barks out a laugh. Why does everyone think Villanelle is so scary? 

She then remembers the file in her bag, thick as  _ War & Peace _ and weighed down with photos, physical proof of what Villanelle is capable of. 

That’s fair, Eve concedes. 

“No, I’m not a shrink,” Eve answers, evenly. “I’ve been brought on to advocate for her during her upcoming appeal. To ensure all relevant information makes it in front of a judge, that she’s treated fairly, by the court and by the state. And to find anything of note that may have been missed, or withheld, during her original trial.” 

The man gives a low, impressed whistle. Eve’s vision ices over. 

“And what have you learned, about our Villanelle?” 

_ Our  _ Villanelle? Eve snorts. 

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that with you,” she says, taking a page out of Barbara’s book while trying to push around him. 

“What?” the man asks, laughing, sidestepping with Eve like a basketball player, boxing her out. “It’s not like you’re her lawyer.” 

“Actually,” she says through her teeth, wondering how much physical contact actually constitutes battery, where that line actually is and if shoving past this bear-man crosses it. “I was hired by her defense team. Her lawyer is paying me for my services so while I may not  _ be _ her lawyer, in the eyes of the court I am  _ like  _ her lawyer and, as such, our conversations stay between us.” 

“Okay, okay,” the man says, appeasing, holding his hands up and moving aside to let Eve breeze by. “Please, then, maybe just tell her one thing? Tell her Konstantin is looking for her.” 

___

True to Barbara’s word, Villanelle is waiting for her in the dank, humid basement room, sitting still, so still, at the metal foldout table. As Eve steps through the threshold, her head snaps around, catching Eve like a possum in the beam of a flashlight, half hanging out of a garbage can. Something rushes through her gut, something laced with adrenaline and for a moment, one terrifying moment she’s back in the bathroom like some fucked up Groundhog’s Day, reliving the scene, watching herself and unable to do anything but silently scream. 

_ Were you really in my hotel room last night?  _ Eve wants to ask.  _ Did you unplug the phone? Why didn’t you kill me? Are you feeling what I’m feeling, too?  _

Instead, she drops a plastic bag on the table in front of Villanelle, styrofoam tower wobbling only slightly. 

“Waffle House?” Villanelle asks. Like she’s been locked up so long she doesn’t quite know how to react to a piece of the outside world coming in. She sits up in her chair a bit, blinking like she expects the bag to disappear. 

“The one and only,” Eve says, taking the top box off the styrofoam stack, leaving the rest for Villanelle. “You look like you could destroy a waffle or six.” 

Popping the top on her box, Eve takes in her own modest two-waffle order, plus hashbrowns, scattered, smothered and covered. Closing her eyes, she inhales a long, deep breath, letting the aroma of America’s favorite diner go to war against her encroaching headache, push back those front lines. Send in the cavalry. The other end of the table, though, is suspiciously quiet and she cracks an eye open to confirm that Villanelle hasn’t touched her feast, is instead only eying it suspiciously. Like it’s full of snakes and not waffles stacked high with every flavor of syrup layered in between. Anyone else would be digging in, but Eve’s been around enough inmates doing hard time to speak the language.

“This really isn’t like, a kindness or anything,” Eve says around a mouthful of waffle, not even bothering to cover her mouth because Villanelle’s not in here because she was elected Ms. Manners of her senior class. “I know what they feed you in here. This is like, human decency.” 

“I fought a line cook at a Waffle House once,” Villanelle says, tearing off her first bit of waffle with her hand, bringing it to her mouth. Like she’s testing it. It passes, apparently, and her eyes slide closed as she sinks into a moment of pure joy. “Um, maybe more like four times. He was always calling me cabbage-eater. And he messed up my eggs every time. How do you even mess up eggs? Don’t they teach you that on the first day of Waffle House school?” 

Eve, who has fucked up eggs plenty of times, takes a bite of hashbrown to cover up a smile. 

“Did you go, like, up over the counter? Or around through those low swinging doors?” 

“Up and over, Eve, of course,” Villanelle replies lightly, tossing aside one empty box and plowing through the second. She peeks up and over the box at Eve and swallows, shyly. If you can even swallow shyly. Whatever, she did it. 

“You look like shit.” 

“That’s rich from someone in a prison jumpsuit.” 

One of Villanelle’s eyebrows raises, rears like a snake ready to strike but Eve doesn’t rattle so easily. She holds her ground, holds her stare. Eve could be a snake too, the two of them winding around each other, up and up and up, racing to the top, angling for the opportunity to swallow the other whole. 

Villanelle retreats, folds her viper’s hood back against her ribs and smirks, emptying out an obscene amount of strawberry jam from a small black container onto her two remaining waffles. 

“You are feisty this morning,” she says, working at the waffle with the flimsy plastic fork, using the edge to try and cut it up. No knives for Villanelle, Eve made sure to take them all out. “I like it.” 

“Yeah well, I slept like shit. This,” Eve says, gesturing to the food, “is about all the pleasantry I can muster.” 

“Yes,” Villanelle hums, her fingers coming up to rub at her chest. At her sternum. “Me too.” 

Eve blinks. In the space between her eyelids, in that tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of a space where atoms and electrons vibrate endlessly until they split, in that space so vast it becomes time, Eve feels the solid pressure of Villanelle’s bone pushing back against her toothbrush. Feels how it would feel to stab someone, if she had something less blunt than mass produced plastic. The shock of it travels from her fingertips back toward her own chest, an equal and opposite reaction. Villanelle’s equal and opposite reaction. 

_ Does she feel it too?  _

“Why are you here, Eve?” She asks it, almost reverently. A woman tormented, lamenting yet another vision coming to her in the dark, this one cloaked as someone as someone promising to help. 

But Eve promised no such thing. She promises only to understand. 

“I told you — I’m here to advocate on your behalf as part of your appeal.” 

“Yes,” Villanelle dismisses, rolling her eyes, sitting up in her chair. “That is why a person is here. But I am asking why  _ you _ are here, Eve Polastri.” 

Her name rolls through Villanelle’s accent like marbles dropping off a table. The syllables plunk, one by one, and Eve finds herself questioning, why  _ is  _ she here? Where is here? The prison? In front of Villanelle? On earth? Does she stalk Villanelle’s dreams, too? Does she pace the rectangular floor of her cell like a caged buck, antlers dragging against the bars, measuring time in skipping, hollow notes? 

“You realize this is a waste of time, right?” Eve tries instead. “I only have three months to prepare for your appeal.” 

“I am not so complex. That is plenty enough time.” 

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as enough time to understand  _ you.”  _

Oh Eve, she thinks to herself. You’re not supposed to say the quiet parts out loud. 

Villanelle’s eyes widen, like headlights going through a tunnel, light pushing, pushing out but never letting anything in. There’s strawberry jam on her chin and like this, Eve can see softness in her. The baby fat not yet melted off her cheeks, eyes filled with wonder, still, and not visions of death. How quick she can turn, from vicious creature to this. Eve’s fingers itch to wipe the jam off her face but that would break at least one hundred rules. Instead, Eve tosses her a napkin. Villanelle stares at it like she’s never seen one in her life, then drags her thumb over her chin and sucks the sweet jam off in a gesture just on the right side of lewd. 

“I have been doing some reading,” Villanelle drawls lazily. She relaxes into the hard metal chair, all slouched shoulders and casually crossed legs. It’s an act Eve sees through in a blink. “Don’t look at me like that, I know how to read.” 

She’s using a finger now to scrape every bit of syrup out of the little containers, each precious morsel of sugar, worth more than gold in here. So childish for someone so deadly. The chain threaded between her wrists clinks like change rattling in a coat pocket. It must be annoying, Eve thinks, for every movement, every muscle twitch to be punctuated with jingling. Like an outdoor cat with a bell on its collar. Silence only in stillness. 

“Anyways, because it is apparently ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ - whatever that is - to deprive me of access to the internet, I spent my evening in the pathetic little library here, using my new human rights to access the Google. I type in, ‘Eve Polastri, advocate’ and what did I find? Turns out you are kind of a big deal in this industry!

“First you put bad people in jail. Good for you! But then you switch sides, and get the bad people out of jail. Good for me, maybe. Then you disappear. Poof! No records. Did you die? Did you go to jail? No, you are right here, tapping at my cell. The most hopeless of hopeless cases.” 

Eve lets out a breath. She overshot her landing with the morning’s coffee, sailing well past ‘keep migraine at bay’ and into overstimulated, the caffeine tickling her nerves like pricks of electricity. 

“So I repeat,” Villanelle says, sweeping her connected arms across the table, sending the styrofoam containers tumbling onto the floor in a dramatic movement. “Why are  _ you  _ here?” 

The bare table shines under the steady beam of the overhead light, a fresh lightbulb, after last time. No chances of it burning out. The glare of it reflected in the metal surface. Tabula rasa. 

“Well since you’ve asked so nicely,” Eve begins. “I’m here because I pissed off my boss. I’m sure you can relate.” 

Across from her, Villanelle smiles. A real Cheshire-cat of a grin. Eve swears she can see her canines sparkle in the light. She’s waiting for more but Eve hesitates. It’s probably not wise, to bare yourself in front of a serial killer. To show them your throat. 

“Tell me about it.” 

“Villanelle, this really isn’t -” 

“Eve,” Villanelle interjects, slamming her hands on the table in unison. Eve’s mouth snaps closed. “It’s not fair. You already know so much about me. You have stacked the deck, here. I am asking only for a few extra cards.” 

“I hardly know anything about you. That’s why I’m here.” 

“Oh? What about that?” Villanelle asks, pointing to the huge file, worn and dogeared, poking out of Eve’s bag. “Do you not sit up late at night, thumbing through it? Do you not sit on your bed, the photos looking up at you like a Tarot spread? Trying to divine who I am using my violence? Do you see that this isn’t fair? How you have such a head start?” 

Eve relents, because Villanelle is right. Not that she would ever, ever tell her. For most of her clients the violence, the killing, is a symptom. Extraneous. But in those rare cases, for people like Villanelle, killing is the most intimate act and, in studying it, Eve is peeping through the bedroom curtains. 

“Fine, since the cat’s out of the bag anyways,” Eve starts. Villanelle tips her head, curiously, her mind working over the idiom no doubt. “I was recruited to the FBI right out of college. Doctorate in crim psych, getting into the head of killers. Particularly female serial killers. Turns out I’m pretty fucking good at it, so the FBI hired me as a behavioral profiler.” 

“Profiler?” 

“Yeah,” Eve continues. “They would send me in to study crimes, mostly murders, and I would use what I learned to paint a picture of who may have done it. Not a literal picture, like a sketch. A figurative one. How old the unsub might be. What race. Their occupation. Their background. Whether they knew the victim. That kind of thing. And the local police would use that profile against their known suspects, to see if it fit. Or they would use it to try and go find a suspect, though that’s really not how it was meant to work.” 

“Did you like that? This, profiling? Did you like serving justice? Putting people in jail?” 

Eve licks her lips, trying to stall as her brain works over the questions. Because really, those are all separate questions with separate answers. Maybe not for most agents, most people in law enforcement. But Eve never really considered herself to be like most of them. 

“I liked,” Eve starts. “Studying them. I liked getting in their head. I liked taking these terrifying shapes in the dark, these monstrous shadows, and turning them into humans. I liked taking away their power. I liked getting as close to them as possible without them even knowing I was watching.” 

Face hot, cheeks burning, mouth dry, pulse fluttering - it takes a moment too long for Eve to realize just how far she’d let herself go, let herself fall back into it until Villanelle leans forward, palms spread, like she’s trying to soak up some for herself. 

“The hunt,” Villanelle murmurs, her eyes shining with contact high. “You liked the hunt. But why stop?” 

“Well, I don’t know if you know this, but the criminal justice system in this country is massively fucked up,” Eve answers. “And it took me … entirely too long to figure that out. Or maybe I always knew it, but it was okay because the Bureau let me do what I really wanted to do and the people we put away were bad people. 

“But putting away a bad person isn’t the same as putting away the right one. And the longer I worked for the Bureau and worked with local police departments, the more I realized that for them, it was more about optics than justice, whatever that is. It was more about looking good, getting the cuffs on someone scary looking enough and getting the DA another win in the courtroom so everyone got another term come election time than it was about making the community safer. The last straw was Kansas. String of child kidnappings and murders. The locals used my profile and some junk science to put the wrong guy away. How do I know it was the wrong guy? Because the same day he was taken away to death row, another kid went missing. Same M.O. The locals covered it up and went back to normal, but I told myself I wouldn’t do that again. Wouldn’t have my work used like that again.” 

“So you switched sides? Started getting people out of jail, to get back at them?” 

“Not get back,” Eve laughs because it wasn’t that. Was it? Was it to get back at them? Maybe a little. A white lie, then. “This work, as an advocate, it’s similar enough. I get to study. Get in the heads of my clients. Drill down into who they are, what led them to commit their crimes. And see through their bullshit.” 

“But again, you have pissed off your boss?” 

“Yeah,” Eve starts, swallowing down the eternal well of anger threatening to bubble up as she revisits the case in her mind. “You were right, when you said I have a reputation. I’ve worked on a lot of high profile cases, with clients most people wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. I’m a big deal in the industry. Or, I was. Until I worked on the final Greenway appeal.” 

“The Ridgeback Killer?” 

“That’s the one. I interviewed him, like this, for months. Investigated his background, talked to people who knew him growing up, dug into everything I could. But when it was time to give my testimony, my boss, well, she pretty heavily hinted I should recommend his sentence be commuted and he be put up on parole.” 

Villanelle’s eyebrows raise a tick, the cogs in her brain all turning at once. She’s smart. Eve knows she’ll put the pieces together. 

“Didn’t they just execute him a few weeks ago?” 

Bingo. 


	6. It's a long way down to the bottom of the river

The wind howls like a symphony of the damned. 

Like a freight train, like a thousand runaway freight trains barreling at each other all at the same time. It sounds like hell. Like everything you’ve ever loved being ripped apart, shredded without a shred of mercy. If someone cut a hole directly into the underworld and held it open, this is what it would sound like to the living. A sea of lost souls, crying out in agony. 

The gusts are so strong Eve can barely see anything. Around her the trees, the rows and rows of parallel pines limber and rubbery with sticky sap, creak and bend until their tops almost touch the ground. When will they snap, Eve wonders. When will they finally give under this unnatural pressure? 

Stumbling forward, Eve grasps for a handhold, for anything. Half-blind from the deafening noise and near whiteout conditions, she can only press herself against the thin trunk of a sapling, dodging branches as it’s piteously whipped by the solid walls of wind. The world around her swells and shudders, alive and full of fury. Everything looks the same, identical alleys stretching north, south, east and west as far as she can see, which really is only a few yards. 

Another gust dislodges Eve from her hiding spot and her feet slip in the sandy mud. Her knees catch her fall, pain ricocheting up her femur and locking her hip into place. She struggles against another battering of wind and for a moment, she flashes back to those late night LifeCall infomercials, the old lady sprawled on the ground yelling about how she can’t get up. Eve thought she had at least another 30 years before her bitter, self-imposed isolation led to her dying alone on the floor but apparently life, or more accurately, Florida, has other plans. 

Somehow, though, in the swirling, earsplitting gale, Eve’s ears catch something out of place. Faint, yet recognizable. Distinct. The shrill ring of a telephone. 

Crawling on her hands and knees, Eve scrambles toward the sound, trying to triangulate its position. Scrambles so fast it takes her a minute to realize she’s sinking, that she’s nearly up to her elbows in mud. The faster she crawls, the harder she tugs, the stronger the suction, until she can’t wrench her hands free anymore. Until she collapses forward into the muck. 

That’s when she feels it. Something shifts beneath her hands, buried deep in the mud. Brushes against her fingertips, exploring, then firm. Eve recoils, or tries to, when she works out what it is. What they are. What she’s feeling. 

Hands. Grasping for her. Pulling her deeper. Pulling her to where  _ they  _ live. 

With a burst of fear and adrenaline, Eve manages to clamber up to her feet and scurry a few steps toward the sound of the telephone. As she does, hands begin to erupt up from the mud, knuckles first, like crabs when the tide goes out. Dozens of them poke out from their holes, reaching for her, for something to drag into the swamp. For the first time, Eve is grateful for the roar of the wind so she doesn’t have to hear the horrible squelch. 

Carefully, she picks her way around the hands while moving fast enough to avoid sinking further into the mud. She’s closer, so close she can hear the ring clearly against the backdrop of the storm. She’s so close she can see it, the phone, attached to the trunk of one of the older pines, sturdy for now but ready to splinter at any moment. It looks just like the phone in her hotel room.

The wind at her back propels Eve forward at a steady pace, until another gust howls and her feet are swept from under her. She lands face first with a thud and a mouthful of wet sand, but when she tries to get up, she’s stopped by an insistent tug. 

A hand, gray and bloated, its knuckles kissed with rot, wrapped around her ankle. 

Her scream is lost to the storm, carried away to the underworld as she kicks, desperately, at the hand circling her ankle like a cuff. She connects but manages only to scrape away chunks of squishy flesh and expose white bone. Her adrenaline spent, she’s about to lay on her back and let herself be dragged into oblivion when a black shape descends from the swirling sky, talons first, with great, thunderous wingbeats. 

A crow, all gleaming pearlescent blue-black feathers and eyes like the night. It pecks and claws at the hand until it releases Eve and slithers back into the silt, beaten into submission. Perched on the ground now, the crow turns to Eve, head tilting slightly as if trying to see some other, hidden part of her. 

“Caw,” it instructs. Around them, the wind dials back to a healthy breeze. 

“Yeah,” Eve answers, scrambling to her feet. 

She reaches the phone mid-ring, bringing the receiver to her ear and choking out a greeting into the scratchy connection. 

“Hello Dr. Polastri,” a voice answers, calm. Authoritative. “This is Gary Scott. Governor of Alabama. I hope I’m not bothering you.” 

Eve swallows.

“What do you need?” she asks. Despite knowing what he needs. There’s only one thing he could possibly be calling about. 

“As you probably know, Raymond Greenway is scheduled for execution tonight,” he says. Of course. “His lawyers asked for a stay, and the Supreme Court granted one. It’s short, though. Enough time for me to quickly review the case and make a final decision. I was reading through the transcript of the appeal hearing and reached your testimony —” 

“With all due respect,” Eve interrupts. “There were about a half-dozen other psychologists and social workers who testified, under oath, that Raymond Greenway was a reformed man. That he’d been healed of his trauma. That he’d found religion and he just wanted to go back to his frumpy wife and ugly kids and be a productive member of society again despite, you know, killing ten people.”

“But you didn’t,” the governor cuts in. “And that’s why I’m calling you. Six months ago, you got on the stand and testified that Raymond Greenway deserved to die. Tonight, I’m asking if you stand by that.” 

Eve doesn’t need a script to know what comes next. She doesn’t even need to think. The words spill out of her mouth as if they’d been replaying over and over and over, on a loop, since that night. Because they had. Like a tape recording, rewinding and starting over on repeat. They’d stopped only when she’d come to Florida. Only when she met ....

“Raymond Greenway is genuinely intelligent, self aware and organized, traits not commonly seen together in serial killers. It’s how he was able to convince the psychologists and social workers, in the span of a two hour interview, that he was a changed man. He knew what they wanted to hear, and understood what he needed to say to achieve the desired outcome. 

I didn’t spend two hours with him, though. I spent three months, not only with him, but with his family, his friends. The people he went to school with. The detectives who investigated his case. And I found that Raymond Greenway is a man who derives pleasure from manipulating and killing. From exacting his will over others. In fact, I believe it is the only way he experiences pleasure and has been for much of his life. It is hardwired into him and no amount of therapy or medication or religion will change that. 

Give him a chance at parole, and you’re sending him back into the unsuspecting world with the belief that he’s outsmarted the system. Only this time, he’ll know something he didn’t before — how to not get caught. Give him life and take him off death row, and you’ve locked a predator in a confined space with dozens of other people and nothing to lose.” 

“You think he’d kill again?” 

“I’d be surprised if he hasn’t tried to go after a guard while he’s waiting.” 

Silence. 

“He has, hasn’t he?” 

“Thank you, Dr. Polastri. I appreciate your time and attention in this matter.” 

The line goes dead. 

Eve holds the receiver to her ear for a few moments, hoping for something, anything to break her out of this cycle. Instead, the dial tone cuts in. She returns the phone to its cradle, fitting the two halves into a hole. 

As she does, as she completes the circuit, another hand, stronger than the first, bursts from the mud below and clamps around her ankle. Before she can react, the dead weight drags her down up to her knees, then her hips. No crow comes to her rescue. She tries to call for it, mouth opening in vain only to fill with thick, suffocating muck. 

Eve jolts upright in the bed, a too-heavy hotel duvet sliding onto the floor. She gulps down mouthfuls of air, the slick of sweat on her forehead and neck evaporating too quickly in the air conditioning, taking her body heat with it. An old as shit episode of Forensic Files plays on the TV, the forensic tech lifting a shoe print from a package of hamburger buns for evidence. The moon watches her, silvery and unblinking, through the window. 

Groaning, she flops back against the pillows and throws an arm over her eyes. She’s already sinking again, consciousness slipping down through quicksand. From somewhere in the room, she swears she hears a Russian-tinged voice tell her to go back to sleep. 

  
  


***********************

Morning finds her down by the lake, tossing torn off chunks of a gas station Krispy Kreme 6-pack to the massive gator. She’d managed to coax him out of the water with the promise of bready sugar, trailing the donut bits up from the bank like breadcrumbs. Now, he waits patiently with his mouth open, waiting for her to throw the bits right onto his tongue. Brightly colored ducks gather up on the grass just out of reach, jealous of the gator’s meal. 

They continue like that, Eve and the gator, through the first few donuts. But around donut number four, Eve gets curious. The gator watches her, fat and docile. Patient. Slow. She wonders if he might let her get close enough to pet him. To run her fingers down his back. This ancient, powerful thing-turned-tame. She throws a piece of donut onto the ground a few inches away from his mouth and as he turns to eat it, she inches forward, her hand outstretched. 

She’s just about to make contact, just a hair’s width away, when he remembers. Remembers he isn’t in a petting zoo. Remembers he isn’t some hand-raised facsimile of a wild thing and lunges, quick as a whip, turning back on himself with a flash of teeth and snapping jaws. 

She steps back just in time, laughing as she cradles her hand to her chest. He growls and she feels the vibrations of it in her ribs. It touches something primal in her, something her ancestors put away once they moved from the forests into cities. Put away but not forgotten. The gator faces her, his back to the water, unsure as to whether he should open his mouth for more donuts or scamper back to the dignity of the lake. 

“That gator botherin’ you ma’am?” 

Eve turns to find a portly man dressed in khaki watching them. He looks like he’s ready for a safari, with a short sleeved-button up and shorts, but he’s wilting under the Florida sun, pit stains already blotting under his arms at barely 9 a.m. A badge on his chest identifies the man as a warden for the park around the lake. That sounds like a cushy job, Eve thinks. She wonders, briefly, if she’d be qualified. 

“No,” she answers, looking back at the gator, who waits, unmoving. He seems to know this man means trouble. “We’re fine here.” 

“Well, if he gets a little too familiar, here’s the number for the Nuisance Gator Hotline,” he says, handing her a card. “Tell them where you are, and some Fish and Wildlife folks will come and take care of it.” 

“Take care of it?” 

“They’ll wrangle him and toss him in the back of a truck. Take him away.” 

“To where,” she says, still watching the gator, its green eyes holding her stare, unblinking. 

“I mean,” he starts. “Aw, ma’am, you didn’t hear it from me, but they do kill them. Make ‘em into trophies and give ‘em to the hunting clubs. You know how it is. We can’t have gators out here snapping at people. And it’s not like there’s a shortage. There’ll be a new one in here in a week. Crawled in from the sewers.” 

“Kill them,” Eve whispers, appalled. Appalled that they would kill something, destroy it, for daring to express itself. For following its nature, because they found it distasteful. She thinks of Villanelle, sitting in her cell, waiting on the same fate. 

“Thank you sir, but as I said, we’re fine here.” As if on cue, the gator swings back toward the lake and slides into the water, having decided he’s had enough of this humiliating ordeal. The ducks eye Eve with hope, but she instead stuffs the last sugar-glazed Krispy Kreme into her mouth whole. It melts in her mouth like cotton candy as she chews and the man, apparently repulsed by her display, wanders back to wherever he came from. 

Good riddance. 

Just as she’s finished chewing, her phone rings in two quick buzzes against her back pocket. Fishing it out, she swallows quickly and answers. 

“Hello, Dr. Polastri. This is Konstantin Vasiliev. We met at the prison yesterday. You and I have a friend in common.” 

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr @vaultdweller or via carrier pigeon


End file.
